-
165
-
36Dennett's rational animals: And how behavorism overlooked themBehavioral and Brain Sciences 6 (3): 372-373. 1983.
-
2A bet with PeacockeIn Cynthia Macdonald & Graham Macdonald (eds.), Philosophy of Psychology: Debates on Psychological Explanation, Blackwell. pp. 285--292. 1995.
-
347White Queen Psychology and Other Essays for AliceMIT Press. 1993.This collection of essays serves both as an introduction to Ruth Millikan’s much-discussed volume Language, Thought, and Other Biological Categories and as an extension and application of Millikan’s central themes, especially in the philosophy of psychology. The title essay discusses meaning rationalism and argues that rationality is not in the head, indeed, that there is no legitimate interpretation under which logical possibility and necessity are known a priori. In other essays, Millikan clar…Read more
-
185Language: A Biological ModelOxford: Clarendon Press. 2005.Ruth Millikan is well known for having developed a strikingly original way for philosophers to seek understanding of mind and language, which she sees as biological phenomena. She now draws together a series of groundbreaking essays which set out her approach to language. Guiding the work of most linguists and philosophers of language today is the assumption that language is governed by prescriptive normative rules. Millikan offers a fundamentally different way of viewing the partial regularitie…Read more
-
4Varieties of purposive behaviorIn R. Mitchell, Nicholas S. Thompson & H. L. Miles (eds.), Anthropomorphism, Anecdotes, and Animals, Suny Press. pp. 189--197. 1997.
-
810In defense of proper functionsPhilosophy of Science 56 (June): 288-302. 1989.I defend the historical definition of "function" originally given in my Language, Thought and Other Biological Categories (1984a). The definition was not offered in the spirit of conceptual analysis but is more akin to a theoretical definition of "function". A major theme is that nonhistorical analyses of "function" fail to deal adequately with items that are not capable of performing their functions
-
406Pushmi-pullyu representationsPhilosophical Perspectives 9 185-200. 1995.A list of groceries, Professor Anscombe once suggested, might be used as a shopping list, telling what to buy, or it might be used as an inventory list, telling what has been bought (Anscombe 1957). If used as a shopping list, the world is supposed to conform to the representation: if the list does not match what is in the grocery bag, it is what is in the bag that is at fault. But if used as an inventory list, the representation is supposed to conform to the world: if the list does not match wh…Read more
-
391Truth, rules, hoverflies, and the Kripke-Wittgenstein paradoxPhilosophical Review 99 (3): 323-53. 1990.
-
65Existence proof for a viable externalismIn Richard Schantz (ed.), The Externalist Challenge, De Gruyter. 2004.
-
117Are there mental indexicals and demonstratives?Philosophical Perspectives 26 (1): 217-234. 2012.
-
Comments on "Millikan's compromised externalism"In Richard Schantz (ed.), The Externalist Challenge, De Gruyter. 2004.
-
67On cognitive luck: Externalism in an evolutionary frameIn Peter K. Machamer & Martin Carrier (eds.), Philosophy and the Sciences of Mind, . 1997."Paleontologists like to say that to a first approximation, all species are extinct (ninety- nine percent is the usual estimate). The organisms we see around us are distant cousins, not great grandparents; they are a few scattered twig-tips of an enormous tree whose branches and trunk are no longer with us." (p. 343-44). The historical life bush consists mainly in dead ends
-
406The father, the son, and the daughter: Sellars, Brandom, and MillikanPragmatics and Cognition 13 (1): 59-71. 2005.The positions of Brandom and Millikan are compared with respect to their common origins in the works of Wilfrid Sellars and Wittgenstein. Millikan takes more seriously the “picturing” themes from Sellars and Wittgenstein. Brandom follows Sellars more closely in deriving the normativity of language from social practice, although there are also hints of a possible derivation from evolutionary theory in Sellars. An important claim common to Brandom and Millikan is that there are no representations …Read more
-
451Preface by Daniel C. Dennett Beginning with a general theory of function applied to body organs, behaviors, customs, and both inner and outer representations, ...
Areas of Interest
Philosophy of Language |
Philosophy of Mind |